Total pages in book: 145
Estimated words: 138274 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 691(@200wpm)___ 553(@250wpm)___ 461(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 138274 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 691(@200wpm)___ 553(@250wpm)___ 461(@300wpm)
Rahvyn and Beth had saved the species in so many ways, all so that L.W. could take the reins. Like father like son, though. The male had no interest in the throne. All he wanted to do was fight, and every night he rolled the dice with greater recklessness. So maybe they were stuck with this lie permanently—and by permanently, until someone noticed that Wrath was two thousand years old or something, and showing no signs of the sharp decline that vampires exhibited at the end of their lives.
It was wrong, all wrong. The whole damned thing, but what could you do?
Other than kill lessers, of course. And hunt Lash down.
As a spike of anger nailed Z in the chest, he checked the clock on his phone and then went back to working on his apple peeling. When he was finished, he dropped the bright green spiral into a trash can and took his first cleave off the rounded swell of fruit.
Sweet and tart at the same time, with a molar crunch that was satisfying. Candy from a tree, and maybe it would bring up his blood sugar levels and cut the crankies a little.
There were a couple of stools against the unadorned wall and he took a load off to wait for the others. The fact that he was stuck with an emergency meeting of the Brotherhood—which wasn’t an emergency at all because, as usual, something bad had happened and that male Nate had been involved in it—was the way the night was going. He’d been boots-on-the-ground downtown for only about ten minutes when he’d watched a very familiar iridescent white Tesla stop in the middle of the fucking four-laner, get approached by a cop-bot—and then take off after a bullet had been discharged into the law enforcement robot from a gun that had no silencer on it.
“At which point things went from crap to shit…” he muttered as he took another slice off the black blade with his fangs.
Courtesy of the emergency-services light show that turned the bot’s patrol car into a roman candle, he’d been momentarily blinded, and then he hadn’t been able to dematerialize out of Dodge even if he’d wanted to because of all the lithium lamps and traffic enforcement cameras that were triggered as part of Caldwell’s Civil Protection Protocol. After that? Cue the car crash. As that idiot Shuli hit the gas to escape the disaster of his own creation, the Tesla had jumped the curb in front of a bagel place, flipped over, and gone for a carnival-ride-slide on its roof.
Naturally, Z’d had an obligation to go and make sure that Tweedle-twat and Tweedle-twit were okay—so he could bash their heads together himself. Setting out at a jog, his footfalls and repeated fucks had been a steady heartbeat of the beatdown he was going to give the pair of jackholes in the Tesla—and he’d known there were two in there before any visuals had confirmed it. Shuli might be an easy-living aristocrat, but the male was not the type to pop a bot in the middle of a downtown street without provocation.
Sure enough, Nate had crawled out from the passenger side, and as Shuli had laid into the guy, even though police were streaming to the scene, there was no question whose finger had pulled that trigger.
The geniuses had taken off before Z could get to them, ducking into an alley, and no doubt ghosting out from there. Of course they’d fucked off the car. With all the money Shuli had inherited after both of his parents had died, the male could afford to leave the two-seater on the sidewalk, and yeah, there was no tracing it.
Some things changed over time. Fake New York State registration chips did not.
But that wasn’t the point. You couldn’t be target-practicing on law enforcement droids like that. Gone were the nights when brothers or soldiers could fix the oopsie of getting the CPD’s attention with an on-scene mental scrub or two. Those fucking bots had to be dealt with by V and his team of hackers at F.T. Headquarters, and that bunch of brainiacs had enough going on already with their remote monitoring of all the places the Brotherhood owned and operated.
What Nate had done wasn’t even sloppy. It had been a deliberate act of defiance against the non-involvement clause of engagement—and now the brothers all had to have a meeting about the unhinged idiot. Instead of being out and doing their real jobs. Or being in and doing their jobs here by monitoring the audiences in person: All civilian appointments had been canceled per Tohr’s order, and all members of the Brotherhood told to convene here.
Nate was a brutal soldier, a real killer in the field. But when that aggression wasn’t tempered by self-control? It was worse than useless. It was a complication that slowed things down, endangered peoples’ lives, and created work for others—